Applauding JAA for supporting Sudan

MK has been on the support Sudan bandwagon for a while now, and so have our friends over at Jewish Aid Australia. JAA CEO Gary “Samo” Samowitz has written a column in this weeks Australian Jewish News about the need to help Sudan and the lessons that we should take from Pesach and apply to the world today.

This is a very important idea and not dissimilar from the one I had when writing about the relevance of “never again” to preventing current genocide rather than just commemorating a past one. I am going to do something that I do not often do and quote myself:

What is happening in Sudan is no Holocaust, it is not nearly as industrialised or systematic as the Nazi genocide. The Nazis aimed to eradicate the Jews from the planet, whereas the Sudanese Arabs are more showing callous indifference to a group of people of a different race who live on land that they want for themselves. That said, there are few arguments to make that eradicating the black Africans living on valuable land in Sudan does not amount to genocide. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was indicted for genocide by the ICC in 2009 and has been flaunting this indictment ever since.

Of course, none of this raises an eyebrow because, as I have written before, the world does not care about black Africans. They fall at the bottom end of the spectrum in terms of value of human life. If Jews are really serious about “never again”, this is not a situation that we can ignore in good conscience. Don’t let the world stand by as the Sudanese genocide continues.

Unfortunately, the AJN seems determined to plummet into irrelevancy and so it has almost no online content aside from a Godawful iPad app that was out-of-date before the iPad was even made. Therefore, I can’t link to Samo’s column directly and you will have to make do with this crappy photo (click to enlarge):

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Major Karnage is a young professional based in Sydney, Australia. He may or may not be a part of some conspiracy controlling your media, depending entirely on how inclined you are to believe those kinds of things.

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